The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (51 page)

Simon turned them over, and his grandfather pressed his fingers against his eyes, leaving two black marks. “Deliverance? My God,” he said hoarsely.

“What’s it mean?” Simon asked.

“I have no idea. But it isn’t good.” He tossed the papers on the ledge and turned to face the huge canvas still covered on the easel in the corner. He ripped off the sheet and stood before the half-finished image of the man and the boy in the rowboat. “Here’s what he could have done, if he hadn’t—”

Simon’s mouth fell open. “You’ve seen it?”

“Of course. Don’t tell me you haven’t. I know you’ve been in here. Looked at this many a time yourself would be my guess.” He didn’t look for confirmation, and of course he was right. “All these years,” his grandfather said, “I thought his painting was a waste of time. Those blasted birds and seascapes . . . But this—this has imagination. Splotches of paint jabbed on the canvas is what I thought at first. Lunacy. But when I stood back, it jumped out at me. Rowboat coming out of the bottom of the canvas there as if you were on it. Sunlight in the water. To see this picture is to be in it.”

Exactly, Simon thought.

“Ah. He had greatness in him and I missed it. All the same, he never did anything like this before. I know. I searched every picture in here. I imagine you have, too. And there it sits. Never to be finished. That’s the utter tragedy of it. The terrible price we’re all paying.”

To stop his grandfather from launching into the terrible price all of Nova Scotia was paying, and to cut off the rising sympathy Simon was feeling for his father—the man who barely knew he was alive—Simon picked up the sheet to cover the picture. But his grandfather stayed his arm. “Remember that old lapstrake rowboat we had? I used to sing to him, ‘Of all the Fishes in the sea—’ ”

“ ‘I like the best the bass. He climbs upon the seaweed trees and slides down on his hands and knees . . .’ I know. Dad used to sing it to me when we were out in that old rowboat.”

“Did he?” His voice fell to a hushed whisper, and Simon saw that his mouth was trembling.

“Wait,” Simon said. “You thought the picture was—you think it’s you and Dad? You’re the man and Dad’s the boy?” He looked again at the picture and back at his grandfather as the pain of that possibility registered.

His grandfather put his arm around him. “Well now, who it is isn’t important, eh? It’s every father and son, suspended there. What do you think?”

Simon jerked away and shoved the charcoal drawings back under the shelf. “He’s nuts, that’s what I think. Nuts.”

“Hold on, boy. He’s lost his compass is all. He’ll find it.”

“What’s he need a compass for? He’s not going anywhere.” Simon pointed at the map of France with its colored pins. “That’s the only place he cares about,” he said.

T
HAT NIGHT
, A
NGUS
lit the lamp in the shed as he did every night. It was cold enough for the stove, but he sat shivering. Unlike some, Angus did not shake with every sudden noise; but he shook often and his head was filled with shrieking noise, his mouth with ashes, and when it was over, he found it best to remain very still. Very still and very far away so as not to corrupt the world around him. So as not to tell the story he had to tell of a friend, brother-in-law, brother and son whose memory would be tarnished by those with ears that could not hear nor ever understand. Marooned on his island, alone with his war, he watched his family head off to their appointed rounds. He opened books and reread the same sentences over and over. Hours would pass unnoticed. He had to force himself to eat. He willed himself in
visible. He sent for an enlarged map of France and Belgium, pinned it up in the art shed, and followed every scrap of war news, keeping watch with the fervor of a religious convert and the longing of a lost pilgrim. Some days, in the dark well of grief and memory, he’d get a flash of how bright, how brilliantly white, death’s deliverance could shine. The white hole that hovered above the pit.

It was at night that the claustrophobia of his landlocked existence fell away—when he could look out to black water and see nothing and feel and know the nothingness of himself.

He sat down and opened Conlon’s most recent letter, which carried, as had all his letters, a thread of connection—news of the men, those alive and those dead, news of the battles. Passchendaele was over. The Third Battle of Ypres had spread a sea of blood over the mud of Flanders like a flood tide, Conlon wrote with journalistic flair. That sea included the blood of the
16
,
000
Canadian casualties Currie had predicted months before.

Boudrey was the latest, his death leaving those still alive in a state of shock. Fell off a duckboard and drowned in the mud, Conlon had written. Hanson, Katz and Kearns had died of wounds. LaPointe, Oxner and McNeil—having stood waist-deep in water for five days straight as German shells rained down—had been taken off the field with fever. Now, Boudrey. “Survival is the surprise,” Conlon wrote, “death expected.”

As he tried to fathom Boudrey’s death, it was Agamemnon who came to Angus. Where in all that suffering was the wisdom Zeus had promised? The grief of memory “dripping in sleep against the heart” was without end. And how he longed for an end. Things he’d barely noticed at the time loomed larger than life—a button on his shirt could bring back buttons hanging by a thread from Publicover’s torn and blood-soaked jacket . . . He stood abruptly, let the letter fall from his hand, lifted the lid off the stove, struck a match and threw it in. When the flames were going, he grabbed his “Deliverance” pictures and held them to the flames, one by one. One for each man who had died. And then the rest of them, one by one, watching the curling paper turn to ash.

Something moved. He felt it more than saw it. There—behind the stove, the sheet had slipped from his easel and revealed the father and son in the boat. Why now? To taunt him in all their unfulfilled promise. He flung the canvas across the room and the easel after it, then raced his hands blindly along the high shelf, found the knife and knelt over the painting. As he raised his arm to slash it, a paper landed like a breath on the floor at his knees. A butterfly. “
Morpho didius
,” the carefully hand-printed letters at the bottom said, and beneath them, the words “Remember, this is your way of being alive.”

Angus slowly got to his feet and took the butterfly to the lamp by the row of windows and studied it. When he looked up, the reflection of his crazed, ravaged face stared back at him.

The note was in Simon Peter’s hand. “Your way of being alive.” Angus sat back amazed. Simon, so secretive, so angry at him for failing to rescue Heist. He’d tried to tell him how useless it would be—yet another failed mission, he’d thought, but hadn’t said. He’d tried to explain how much safer Heist was in prison—safe from those eager to fight the war at home and for whom Heist had already proven an easy target. Staring at him with confusion that transformed to dull-eyed detachment, Simon had dropped his spoon in his empty mug. The clatter of it reverberated through the distance between them. Angus sat there, a ruminating, broken man with nothing to offer. And now, his son had sent him a message.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING,
before he left for school, Simon Peter found his father leaning on the shelf, asleep—brushes and paints splayed out next to him. He noted the canvas flung up against the flattened easel. He refused to care. Under his father’s elbow lay the butterfly, still intact. That he did care about. His father stirred and sat up, blinking.

“The butterfly,” Simon said. “It’s mine.”

“You made it? Copied it from that butterfly book?” His father rubbed his face. “The note at the bottom
. This is your way of being alive
. What did you mean by it?”

“Nothing. Just something between me and Mr. Heist.”

“So it’s a message . . . for him?”

“That’s right,” Simon said. “I made it for him. He needs it. A thing of beauty. Because that’s what keeps him going. He said so once.”

He picked up the butterfly and left.

T
WENTY
-S
EVEN

April 9
^th
, 1918

Snag Harbor, Nova Scotia

F
ive months later, a year to the day after Vimy, the
Morpho didius
with its iridescent blue wings and white-
spotted wing tips—all its unattainable beauty—
fluttered through Angus with nothing to offer but regret. It came to
him on the train back from Halifax, where he had been since late December, helping to orchestrate relief work—not for war’s victims overseas, but for her dead at home. Half of Halifax and half of Dartmouth had been leveled in an explosion that shook the ground in Snag Harbor, over sixty miles away.

In a navigational blunder of epic proportion and cruelest irony, the
S.S.
Imo
, a Norwegian tramp steamer loaded with relief supplies for Belgium, collided with the freighter
Mont-Blanc
, loaded with the makings of weapons for the war—picric acid and TNT in her hold and thirty-five tons of benzine strapped to her decks in casks. The final and deadly irony was that the sight of the
Mont-Blanc
in the harbor brought people out to watch, as a ship on fire always did. Unaware of her lethal cargo, they stood mesmerized on the streets, at office windows and at the water’s edge. Then she blew.

More than
2
,
000
were killed,
20
,
000
left homeless, hundreds orphaned, and many more blinded by flying glass. The explosion sent boats careening through the air. It forced the harbor waters apart, then set off a tidal wave that raced in over the city—news that left a white-faced Simon unable to speak.

And then came the blizzard, one of the worst on record, coating the ruins in ice, burying them beneath snow, bringing to a halt trains with supplies and aid from all over Canada and New England. And, despite clear evidence from the inquiry that the explosion had been neither an act of war nor the work of spies, but rather the result of human error, those of German descent, some of whom had relatives in Snag Harbor, were attacked on the streets, and many placed under temporary arrest. Duncan had stood up at a town meeting organized by Lady Bromley to step up relief efforts. Stood up without being invited and spoke about the desperation the tragedy had wrought, not just in physical suffering, but in spirit. And he spoke of hearts blackened by revenge. “Let not the death toll include the
souls
of men still living,” he said. There was no doubt whose souls he was talking about, and this time his words were met with silent approval.

Ida told Angus it was his finest moment. She held her apron to her face, her knuckles red and raw. “When the explosion happened, he wondered if it was God’s retribution for us being in the war. He always said Nova Scotia would pay. He didn’t say it to other folks, mind. Just to me. But when it come out how bad it was, he left that notion behind.”

“You love him, don’t you, Ida?” Angus said, sitting at the kitchen table with her.